The Community Bookshelf inspired me to reflect on books I’d read around the times I was living in a place. A bit of Googling, which wasn’t really a verb when I read Shanghai Baby, I came across this sequel. Marrying Buddha continues the story of Coco in (probably) largely fictional auto-biographical tale of her bouncing once again between 2 lovers, her Japanese boyfriend Muju, and a “George Clooney lookalike” Nick. I’d almost forgotten how much of a sex symbol George was in the late ’00s.
It’s a lightly sexy book, with the occasional “pushed up against kitchen counter/walls/bookshelves” (Delete as appropriate for whatever the current BookTok trend is) and it makes several references to Shanghai Baby and how it was banned in China. Maybe it was. I certainly had no problem finding it on the black market which sounds far more clock & dagger than it really was. I bought it along with a few other books from a man who was selling many books on the street. There were also Chinese language copies available. It reminds me of a joke I once heard about the advertising for the 2011 movie The Devil Inside “The film the Vatican doesn’t want you to see.” Yes, because it’s trash. The Vatican film and book lists contain some genuine works of art some of which are openly critical of the church. It’s the same with “banned books” in China. They’re not banned per se, just not published by one of the big book publishers but still very obviously available. The “controversy” comes from Coco, a character who does feel like a lot of the messy people I met in Shanghai in the mid ’00s, and feeds into the messy woman trope.
Feeling a little nostalgic and the emotive reflections that come with that also led me to think about where I’ve come across messy women in fiction. From my life experience at least, a lot of the conversation about it was around Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. I remember hearing a few years later how Billie Eilish had said she wrote Bad Guy to tell the world that women could be bad too. How naive we are in our youth.
It’s a decent enough read, and moves briskly. It landed more for me because I was in a nostalgic mood rather than being “good” in its own right. It wouldn’t stand alone without reading the first one. Coco is just presented as is and the references back to the first book act as a shortcut to developing characters and to a lesser extent narrative.
